Hieroglyphs were not deciphered until the beginning of the 19th century by Jean-François Champollion, so reports of curses prior to this are simply perceived bad luck associated with the handling of mummies and other artifacts from tombs. In 1699, Louis Penicher wrote an account in which he recorded how a Polish traveler bought two mummies in Alexandria and embarked on a sea journey with the mummies in the cargo hold. The traveler was alarmed by recurring visions of two specters, and the stormy seas did not abate until the mummies were thrown overboard.[2] Zahi Hawass recalled that as a young archaeologist excavating at Kom Abu-Bellou he had to transport a number of artifacts from the Greco-Roman site. His cousin died on that day, on its anniversary, his uncle died and on the third anniversary his aunt died. Years later, when he excavated the tombs of the builders of the pyramids at Giza, he encountered the curse: "All people who enter this tomb who will make evil against this tomb and destroy it may the crocodile be against them in water, and snakes against them on land. May the hippopotamus be against them in water, the scorpion against them on land."[5] Though not superstitious, he decided not to disturb the mummies. However, he later was involved in the removal of two child mummies from Bahariya Oasis to a museum and reported he was haunted by the children in his dreams. The phenomena did not stop until the mummy of the father was re-united with the children in the museum. He came to the conclusion that mummies should not be displayed, though it was a lesser evil than allowing the general public into the tombs.[5] Hawass also recorded an incident of a sick young boy who loved Ancient Egypt and was subject to a "miracle" cure in the Egyptian Museum when he looked into the eyes of the mummy of King Ahmose I. Thereafter, the boy read everything he could find on Ancient Egypt, especially the Hyksos period.[6] The idea of a mummy reviving from the dead, an essential element of many mummy curse tales, was developed in The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, an early work combining science fiction and horror, written by Jane C. Loudon and published anonymously in 1827. Louisa May Alcott was thought by Dominic Montserrat to have been the first to use a fully formed "mummy curse" plot in her 1869 story Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy's Curse, a hitherto forgotten piece of mummy fiction that he rediscovered in the late 1990s.[7] However, two stories subsequently discovered by S. J. Wolfe, Robert Singerman and Jasmine Day – The Mummy’s Soul (Anonymous, 1862) and After Three Thousand Years (Jane G. Austin, 1868) – have similar plots, in which a female mummy takes magical revenge upon her male desecrator. Jasmine Day therefore argues that the modern European concept of curses is based upon an analogy between desecration of tombs and rape, interpreting early curse fiction as proto-feminist narratives authored by women. The Anonymous and Austin stories predate Alcott's piece, raising the possibility that even earlier "lost" mummy curse prototype fiction awaits rediscovery.[8]